For this first meeting between leaders who had, until then, spoken only through interposed screens, the entourages of Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron had taken care of the staging.
This Saturday, June 12, the President of the United States and his French counterpart settled in the open air on a terrace, seated in wicker armchairs, sunglasses in hand for the American and both with their backs to the beach of golden sands of Carbis Bay, a seaside town in Cornwall in the south-west of England where the G7 summit is held (United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and United Kingdom).
"Is America Back?"
"Launch the journalists, an allusion to" America is back ", the message hammered by the American president invested in January.
"Ask him", replies the latter, pointing to Emmanuel Macron with his finger.
"Certainly, approves the person concerned, it is great to have an American president very eager to cooperate".
He converses in English with the host of the White House, as he did with his predecessor Donald Trump.
Macron facing the Bidenmania
For the comparison with this "difficult period", as described by a senior diplomat, we also note that the relaxed style contrasts with the famous manly handshake imposed by the Republican president on the tenant of the Elysee Palace during their first meeting in margin of a NATO summit in 2017 in Brussels.
"We are on the same line", finally assures Joe Biden, about the hot issues of the moment: fight against the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccination, posture towards China and Russia, future of the Transatlantic Alliance (NATO holds its summit on Monday)… However, not sure that behind these kindnesses, Joe Biden's “America is back” is so different from Donald's “America first” (America first) Trump who despised Europe.
During his press conference on Thursday at the Elysee Palace, Emmanuel Macron insisted on affixing his own mark.
Sometimes allowing a certain annoyance to appear in the face of "Bidenmania" in Europe, linked in particular to the American tax offensive against multinationals or to its proposal for the temporary lifting of patents on vaccines in order to speed up production for them. poor countries.
Africans, corrects the French president, prefer something concrete and fast: "They no longer believe in our commitments in figures, they believe in the doses which arrive on the ground".
For example, in Burkina Faso, France delivered more than 110,000 doses of serum.
The strategy against China
In Carbis Bay, the leaders of the G7 powers also launched, under the aegis of the American president, for whom China is the number one adversary, a vast global infrastructure project for poor countries, just to compete with the roads Chinese silk, vectors of geopolitical influence in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East… Called “Rebuilding the world better”, this plan was warmly welcomed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
However, throughout the Trump years, Paris has encouraged a specific strategy of the European Union vis-à-vis the two giants: neither embarked on Washington's crusade against Beijing, nor "vassalized" by China. The Elysee Palace had also worked for a real rise in the power of a defense Europe, helped in this project of "sovereignty" by a Donald Trump who claimed to end NATO, too costly in his eyes for America. .
With the Biden administration, won't the Twenty-Seven be tempted to let their guard down again? The President of the Brussels Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, welcomed on Twitter the return of "solidarity" and "cooperation" within the G7, the American president having decided to consult his allies before his summit with Vladimir Poutine, Wednesday in Geneva. “A Biden phenomenon? But there he is only reconnecting with the practices of multilateralism prevailing before the Trump parenthesis ", annoys a minister of Macron ...
